


at every moment some farther distance

by intentandinvention



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Tyvia, Young Daud, references to events in DotO, the Eyeless - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-02-17 14:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13078683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intentandinvention/pseuds/intentandinvention
Summary: Six months after being Marked, Daud travels to the far north of Tyvia for a contract, against the Outsider's wishes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This sort of appeared, based on a couple of lines from Daud in my fic [Much Abides](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4082584?view_full_work=true). This is set in the same universe, although a couple of decades earlier. Chapters will most likely continue to be short, and I will update tags as needed. All unbeta'd as usual, so do yell if you see any mistakes :D
> 
> The title is a quote from Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South - "at every moment some farther distance, and yet no sign of God!".

The light’s already started fading from the days when Daud agrees to accompany a sled caravan on the Samara road. Winter, it seems, comes in fast and freezing this far north. The locals laugh at Daud’s thick Gristol-made coat (not thick enough for the lightest of Tyvian winters) and his dark southern skin (yearning endlessly for Karnacan summer), but the Morley steel he carries and the skill and recklessness with which he uses it, that gets him enough grudging respect to be hired on as a caravan guard.

He’s the first southerner most of them have seen, and he doesn’t bother correcting them about his parentage when they make jokes in heavily accented Gristolian about Serkonan dances and drinks. His father may well have been Serkonan, but given that he knows nothing of the man, he’ll take his mother’s untranslated lullabies and the way she braided her cloud of black hair over him any day.

Daud tries not to rub at the Mark on his left hand, still raw beneath thick gloves a good six months after the black-eyed boy burned it onto his skin.

Five days in, bandits attack, and he lets them kill and scatter his travelling companions before he takes them out in a burst of Void light and steel. When the snow’s sprayed red he takes his pick of the caravan goods and replaces his bloodied Gristol coat with a dead man’s, thick leather with fur around the collar and cuffs, the scent of copper soaked in. It’s a day’s drive to Samara still. The snow dogs need only a little encouragement to tear out their extra rations with the practicality of creatures born in the dark of the Tyvian winter, snarling and snapping. By the time they set off again, Daud alone at the reins of the lead sled with his hands curled warm beneath layers of blankets, the dogs’ fur is as stained as the snow and the sun is setting.

The dark of Tyvia’s northern wilderness is absolute. The slivered moon shrouds itself in black, and although on other nights Daud has stared out of uneven glass windows at fields and fields of the brightest stars in the Empire, there’s no sign of them as the dogs drag him towards the frozen edges of the world. The only indication that anything lives beyond the breath freezing to ice in his scarf is the rhythmic scuff and thud of paws on packed snow. He huddles low against the dead air and wonders if the dogs will stop at Samara, or if they'll run on through the endless night.

After an age the clouds begin to lighten, suggesting that somewhere there may have been a sunrise. In the dim grey dawn Daud sees the dark line that marks the buildings on the edge of a town, and he pulls the dogs gently to a halt. The bitter cold beyond the blankets is unpleasant, but he’s lived through worse. With no patience for knots and buckles, he saws through the traces, leaves the dogs milling around the sled. 

Pack filled with reindeer jerky, coin and a contract for the life of a local gambler whose luck’s run dry, knives snug in his belt, boots and sleeves, Daud sets off for Samara.


	2. Chapter 2

He arrives at what he judges to be just past midday, the sky a bruised violet-grey and shadows dull on the snow. The buildings here squat low to the ground in no particular formation, dark wood and flaking bark, their windows small and shuttered and the only sign of life the smoke rising from rusting iron chimneys. Winter’s not yet come, so the snow piled away from the path between structures only just reaches Daud’s waist. As he follows the trodden-down path, a dog starts barking somewhere nearby, the noise of it ringing between buildings until it’s muffled by the juddering slam of a door. There are people here, then, and honestly Daud doesn’t blame them for staying indoors. 

Some of the buildings he passes groan under the weight of the snow on their walls, no path beaten to their doors. After the fifth he’s fairly sure they’re abandoned, which at least gives him hope there’ll be somewhere to stay in this place if no bed is offered.

The path leads to a central open area, and here at last there are people, a couple of men sitting on a rough bench with pipes in hand, a child bundled so heavily in furs it’s practically rolling alongside a snow dog. All four look up curiously as Daud gets his bearings, but he’s been in enough Tyvian backwoods by now to know that the building with the red door and the railing out front is what passes for a tavern around here, and he heads straight for it.

Inside he takes a seat at the rough wooden bar and nods at the middle-aged woman on the other side of it, her face set in a frown of concentration as she pushes a needle through the thick leather of a half-fashioned glove. There’s no one else here at this time; the one table in the room has rusting tools laid out on it.

‘You’re far from home, young man,’ the woman says, without looking up.

Daud’s been far from home since he was sixteen, and always will be now, but he bites his tongue and starts to unwind his scarf, already warm in the heat of the little iron stove. His head’s aching, probably from gritting his teeth against the cold. ‘I am, and I’m not sure I’m made for this weather,’ he agrees. A hint of discomfort is usually enough to drop a stranger’s guard. ‘I’m looking for Petr Mikhaev; would you know where I can find him?’

Further south he’d be more discreet, wary of local law enforcement getting involved, but he’s learned that the colder it gets, the more the locals seem to respect a direct approach. Besides, the sooner he finds Mikhaev the sooner he can start the journey south. Up here they have different stories, and whilst they still carve bones dark with runes, they’re the bones of land creatures dedicated to fire and green things, and they’re lifeless beneath Daud’s fingertips. The black-eyed boy hasn’t appeared in his waking dreams for weeks, as if he’s weaker up here. Daud’s almost beginning to miss him.

Of course, part of the disappearance might be down to the cold fury Daud heard in his voice the last time they talked. The memory of it makes him frown. The boy’s never tried to stop him taking a contract before. He’s made snide comments, certainly, intimated that murder is such an unsophisticated tool, that he expects more from Daud (and Daud doesn’t know where that idea came from, as if he wasn’t lowlife scum long before he washed up on Redmoor Bay with his hand branded black), and Daud had become used to that. This time, though, the Outsider had almost raised his voice, and the Void had trembled with it.

Daud shakes himself out of his thoughts. The Tyvian woman’s put her leatherworking aside, and she’s looking him up and down. ‘I see,’ she says calmly. ‘Well. I think Mikhaev’s been expecting you for a while, but he’s out of town until tomorrow. I’m Irina, proprietor here. You look dead on your feet; can I offer you a bed?’

It’s an effort to conceal his shock; what does she mean, Mikhaev’s _expecting_ him? 


	3. Chapter 3

The stew Irina provides is the first hot meal Daud’s had in days and the box bed in the next room is piled high with blankets, and although he doesn’t mean to fall asleep with Irina’s words to think on, he wakes hours later to loud voices drifting in from the bar. Evening, he decides as he checks the knife he’d slid under his pillow— late, judging from the slurring.

A little rummaging in his pack and he draws out a leather journal, opens it at a page covered in his personal code. Best to review what he knows of his contract before heading out.

It’s frustratingly little. Back in Gristol he has sources and contacts for research, and even in Karnaca and Morley he knows enough to find what he needs, but up here it’s considerably more difficult. The client works through an intermediary who found Daud in Fraeport and gave him next to nothing besides a drawing of the target, only saying that Mikhaev’s a mediocre clockmaker and terrible gambler who can no longer afford his habit. The pay is exceptionally good — Daud had assumed because of the travelling involved, but he’d never been this far north and it seemed as good a time to go as any — and there are no odd conditions, only the fairly standard one that a particular tattoo be cut from the man’s arm to prove the contract fulfilled. There was no mention of Mikhaev being informed of his murder in advance.

Perhaps Irina thought Daud was a customer, although why anyone would travel this far north for a clock is utterly beyond him. He sighs and closes the journal, massaging his temples in an attempt to ease the pain building there, and pulls on his discarded layers before he heads into the bar.

Not every one of the dozen or so patrons falls silent as he appears in the doorway, but the noise level drops more than enough. A few of them turn to look at him, faces carefully neutral and heads a little lowered, almost as if in deference. He wonders what in the Void Irina has told them, and makes for the door with as much purpose as he can manage. Perhaps the cold air will clear his headache.

As he steps out into the torchlit night, someone murmurs something he doesn’t catch. The tension springs tight until he closes the door behind him — and then it’s just Daud and the packed snow, the voices muffled through thick wood.

The cold makes his teeth ache. He leans on the wooden railing and glares at the loose huddle of buildings around him. Beyond the deserted clearing everything’s dark, only the occasional leak of light from a home indicating that anyone lives here. Daud had been irritated at the lack of address for Mikhaev when he got the contract, but now that he’s in Samara with not a single street sign — or street — to be seen, that makes sense. He’s never missed cities before. Out here he can hear the silence beneath the sound, gaps in conversation when there’s nothing but the cold hanging in the air and the occasional sigh of the wind.

And something else, he realises. The sound slips beneath the surface of the chatter behind him, near inaudible, but when everything else falls quiet it buzzes in his bones, judders against his inner ear like the lightest touch of a rusted saw. No wonder he has a headache. It feels almost like the presence of a bonecharm, one he can use, but this dull jaggedness is a far cry from the high, sharp song he’s used to.

A few steps and he has a direction, straight into the shadows of the town. He follows it into the near-dark, past shards of escaped firelight and the occasional murmur through shuttered windows, his eyes adjusting gradually. He’s almost at the edge of the town, where the lights are spread few and far between, when the ragged buzz is joined by the hissing that usually means the charm is close.

Daud shuts his eyes, and when he opens them again he pulls the Void from his Mark into them, and it rises in his eyes and steals what little light there was. For a moment everything is pitch black. A heartbeat, and suddenly there’s a flicker a few yards to his left, sparking fitfully. He catches a glimpse of small shapes, but the Voidlight crawls and crackles in them instead of glowing steady, and at this angle it’s impossible to work out what he’s looking at.

Snow crunches behind him and his heart skips a beat. He turns, the Void draining from his eyes, to see a lantern held high. The light’s almost blinding after the near-dark; he can see nothing of the person holding it.

‘What are you doing?’ the man demands. Despite the tone there’s a shrill edge to his voice that sounds like fear.

Daud shields his eyes with his hand, tries a smile despite the Void noise drilling into his head. He’s got no chance of passing as a local, not this far north, or in a town small enough that he’d bet they all know one another, so best to be friendly and ignorant. ‘Honestly?’ he says. ‘I’m lost. Came out for a walk to clear my head, got turned around in all this infernal dark. Can you point me back to Irina’s tavern?’

The lantern’s lowered, and in the glow of it Daud sees the stranger’s face and schools his own to neutrality as he wonders what the odds are that he should run into Petr Mikhaev in the near-empty Samaran night. The man looks a little older, perhaps has a decade on Daud, and he’s gained a half-hearted beard and lost weight since the artist’s depiction of him, but there’s no doubt it’s Mikhaev. There’s the scar across the left cheek, the thin lips and slightly crooked nose. And he’s apparently expecting Daud, or someone like him. Daud slides a hand into one of his coat pockets, closes his gloved fingers around the hilt of a knife as Mikhaev looks him up and down, scowling.

Finally Mikhaev sighs, although he doesn't appear to relax, shoulders hunched.

‘The tavern? Ah, you’re from out of town. You’ll forgive me if I made you jump - I’m back early from a business trip, came out to see who was lurking on the path near my home.’ He gestures up the cleared path to a building with light spilling over the snow from an unshuttered window, a narrow trail trodden to the door.

Daud glances to his left, where the Void shivered over indistinct shapes. There’s another building there, but the snow’s piled shoulder-high against it, one of the windows empty of glass and its shutter hanging off. Abandoned, then.

‘Irina’s is that way,’ Mikhaev says, and Daud realises that he could fulfil his contract here and now, leave Mikhaev’s body in the snow or perhaps drag it inside where it’s less likely to be discovered, and be shot of Samara all the sooner.

He remembers the fury in the Outsider’s voice.

‘Thanks,’ he says, and heads back up the path.


	4. Chapter 4

When Daud makes his way back to the bar, it’s near-empty. The woman with her face flat against the table in the corner snores as he knocks the snow off his boots, and Irina looks up from rearranging bottles against the wall, smiles at him.

‘You were out for a while,’ she says brightly. She pulls an earthenware bottle out, pours a shot into a small glass and slides it to his edge of the bar, pours another for herself.

Daud considers his bed and another check of his journal notes, but it’s been a while since he’s sat down to company with a drink and no purpose other than passing time, and anyway he knows the notes back to front. So he pulls off the heavy furs and hat, unwinds the scarf and gently draws his hands from his thick outer gloves, careful not to accidentally remove the thinner pair beneath. There are no Overseers up here, none that he’s seen anyway, but best not to spook people.

‘Got lost,’ he says as he takes a seat at the bar, snagging the glass. Maybe alcohol will block out the intermittent rasp at the edge of his senses. ‘Has it never occurred to you people to have streetlights?’

Irina laughs easily, and tosses her shot back. ‘We’d need streets first, city boy. How’d you find your way back again? Somebody rescue you?’

‘Aye,’ Daud says, remembering just in time that he’s not supposed to have recognised Mikhaev. He drinks his shot, the clear liquor leaving fumes on his tongue, and toys with the glass between his fingers. There are questions he wants to ask – too many –and most of them Irina won’t be able to answer anyway. Daud’s never been a fan of ambiguity: he takes the contract and gets the work done. No need to get philosophical about it. People make their decisions and they take what comes, and sometimes that means their name on a contract. Sure, since the black-eyed boy dragged Daud from the waves the work’s included putting up with snippy remarks in return for a supernatural edge, but he’s never before got the impression that the Outsider had a stake in the game.

Daud sighs, slides the shot glass over. ‘What can you tell me about Mikhaev?’

The bottle tips: the shot glass comes back, along with an evaluating look. Irina leans against the bar and pulls her leatherwork from beneath it. ‘Didn’t do your research?’

‘Humour me,’ he says, downing the shot.

‘He moved here maybe ten years back, from Serkonos. All by himself, no family. Not sure if Petr’s from the south originally, he doesn’t talk about it much in here and I’ll eat my own gloves if that’s the name his mother gave him. I gather he ran into trouble with some kind of gang, came here for a clean start. Didn’t do him much good. He’s a gambler of some kind, and not a smart one — leaves town for weeks on end, comes back with no money and nothing to show for it.’ Irina pours her own drink, raises an eyebrow. ‘The man says he’s a clockmaker, but there’s no market here for that, and no one’s ever known him to send stock south. He gets nervous around Overseers; they turn up every few months to make sure we’re not knee-deep in pagan rites, and Petr goes missing every time.’

‘Why do you think I’m here?’ Daud asks. Might as well know.

Irina knocks her shot back, pulls his glass over and pours another two. ‘A few of the lads think you’re from the Abbey, but Overseers come in groups, all masked up, and they don’t drink. Someone said you might be a childhood friend from Serkonos; someone else reckons you’re from that gang Petr talks about when he’s had a few too many. Actually, that was what I figured when you walked in; a Serkonan bruiser arriving by himself, with blood on his coat? I don’t know. Maybe you’re here to be sorely disappointed about buying a clock.’

Huh. The man who paid Daud to kill Mikhaev didn’t actually give him a reason, only said the man’s luck had run out. And whilst the Abbey would fervently deny the use of hired thugs like himself, he’s certainly done a job or two for individual Overseers through the years. A Serkonan gang isn’t out of the bounds of possibility either; the bigger ones certainly have the connections to have found him at Fraeport.

‘So which is it, then?’ Irina asks idly.

Daud cocks his head at her, questioning.

She downs her shot; he does the same, although he’s noticing a certain gentle haziness to his thoughts. He watches as she stitches a seam closed in the quiet, her needle glinting in the light from the oil lamps.

‘I’m still deciding,’ Daud says finally.

‘I … see,’ Irina says, in a tone that says that she doesn’t, but she seems to notice she’s caught him off balance. ‘Well. How was your journey here?’

He lies, and so they move smoothly away from the topic of Mikhaev. They talk quietly about Tyvia, and snow, and other inconsequential and comfortable things, until the stove starts to burn low and they both retreat to bed, Irina gently waking the woman in the corner.

Daud piles his clothes at the end of the bed, lies down to sleep with a knife under his pillow. He stares up into the carved timbers of the ceiling, his thoughts hazy with alcohol and ambiguity, and listens to the faint rasp of the Void against his senses.

‘You’ve got one night,’ he says softly, although he has no idea if the black-eyed boy can hear him. ‘If this is so important, convince me.’

 

Daud’s sleep is entirely dreamless; he wakes to the sound of Irina cooking breakfast in the next room. He stares up at the timbers for a time, thinking, and then he packs his bag, pays for room and board, and heads out into the snow to kill Petr Mikhaev.


	5. Chapter 5

Beyond the torchlight of the town centre, Samara’s sky is fathomless. Its stars hang motionless in the depths, suspended from infinite and invisible cords, and Daud finds his eyes drawn constantly up to the cold light of them, and the immense darknesses between them.

He has no time for it: there’s a contract to be met.

After one last glance, he drops his pack in the snow beside Mikhaev’s door and pulls the Void into his eyes, concentrating his attention away from the jagged hum in the next building. Mikhaev is seated at a desk, tinkering with some form of clockwork mechanism. There’s nothing else of interest in the single-roomed building, nothing that the man considers a weapon or an item of particular value, only a few coins. It’s odd; most people have something to hide, even if it’s just a favoured piece of jewellery.

Daud loosens his blade from its holster, releases the Void from his eyes, and knocks.

‘A moment, this particular piece of clockwork is very delicate!’ Mikhaev calls. His words are accompanied by a rustle of paper, and followed by the sound of a cupboard being slammed shut.

Just as Daud is considering checking that his target hasn’t left through a window, the door shuffles open, Mikhaev standing in the gap. He doesn’t seem to recognise Daud, but he’s scowling anyway. ‘Who are you, and what do you want?’ he snaps.

The fight is short.

When it’s all over, Daud staggers to the washbasin in the corner of Mikhaev’s home, holding a towel already damp with blood pressed tight to the right side of his face. His eye is streaming, a lancing pain that wakes anew every time he shifts his fingers, and when he sorts through a crowded shelf one-handed he leaves stark red smears on the pale wood. He finds alcohol, a steel needle and some thread and mends himself as best he can, which would be better if his hands weren’t still shaking from adrenaline and anger and not a small amount of fear. When he’s done he washes blood from his face with the last of the alcohol and tilts his head towards the tin mirror, checking his handiwork.

Mikhaev’s wild slash will most likely mark his face from temple to jawline until the day he dies, but at least he still has his eye. He’s never fought a target before who seemed to be able to see his every move before he made it.

Daud turns to Mikhaev’s body, sprawled limp over the back of a broken chair that drips and gleams red, and kneels down to pick up the man’s left wrist in its fastidious cotton glove. The tattoo is as the contract said it would be, halfway up the forearm. It looks like some kind of natural philosophers’ symbol or navigation instrument: two lines diverging from an acute angle to be capped by a curve, a further line pointing outwards from that with its own straight cap.

His head still aching as the Void’s hiss crackles along the edges of the wound, Daud draws one of his sharper, smaller knives, and pulls the bloody glove off the hand so that he can get a better grip.

And freezes.

The removal of the glove has revealed a black imprint on the back of Mikhaev’s hand. It gleams in the cold daylight.

Daud stares at the all-too-familiar shapes of it and thinks of the black-eyed boy’s warning. Wonders if one day another of the Marked will come for him with the same Void-shaking anger lurking disregarded in their mind.

Of course, perhaps Mikhaev was special, and the Outsider will dismiss Daud’s murder with the same singsong disinterest he’s shown every other one of Daud’s targets. Maybe even now he’s branding some poor sod with a sharp blade and a short life expectancy who fancies his chances or just needs the money.

Daud’s lip curls. He’s not lost a fight since he was eighteen and he doesn’t intend to start now. Let them come. At least that explains the Void noise sawing at his eardrums; whatever it is, it undoubtedly belongs to his target.

He takes his proof of the kill, wipes his hands on Mikhaev’s shirt and heads over to the worktable. No point leaving valuables around when there’s no relative to claim them. The first drawer opens on a jumble of lenses and gears — no use to an assassin. The second… it’s some kind of magnifying instrument, a brass-banded sphere with a fluted tin mirror attached, perhaps the size of a hand. No wonder Mikhaev wasn’t making any money. Daud’s about to close the drawer on it when he sees the sketched symbols on the paper beneath.

For a moment he can’t place why he recognises them. They look a little like fish bones, or harpoon blades: odd arrays of hooked lines and sharp curves scattered around the page amongst scribbled annotations. Then it all shifts, his mind suddenly seeing what could be there as well as what is, and he recognises a meticulous dissection of the Outsider’s Mark.

Well. Perhaps Mikhaev _was_ special.


	6. Chapter 6

When Daud looks up from Mikhaev’s papers, he realises that night has crept into the room behind him. The lamp at the desk stands in a halo of soft gold, and everything beyond it is swallowed by the dark and the deep smell of blood, Mikhaev’s corpse a misshapen lump that merges with the chair to become something monstrous.

There are diagrams and sketches and endless field notes beneath his fingers, pulled from box after box. Mikhaev’s “gambling” trips outside Samara are documented in minute detail – sometimes north, to trade with the whale hunters for bone, and sometimes south to the glacial heart of Tyvia to make incomprehensible measurements and observations. Never gambling, but there are careful accounts that indicate that journeys like that consume money like fuel, and return nothing but wild speculation. Daud can see how certain organisations might wish to have them stopped. Mikhaev was some kind of natural philosopher, that’s clear enough, but amidst the detailed experiments and careful calculations there are sketches of things half-seen amongst flying snow and deep blue ice, of paintings on the walls of forgotten caves. The tools that he’s painstakingly planned out and constructed are nonsensical, weird contraptions of metal and bone with smoked lenses and enigmatic units of measurement.

Mentions of “the boy in the black” are few and far between, threading through the papers like smoke, peripheral and vague. Far more frequent is the Mark, whole and fragmented and even redrawn. That last makes Daud think of desecration, of bones assembled to make a creature with no regard for the flesh they once carried; those pages he turns without hesitation, particularly since the scrawled words on them are usually illegible.

He wonders if Mikhaev was harmlessly mad or dangerously sane, and whether it caused him to be Marked or was the result of the Mark, and if the Outsider was more concerned about the man’s research being halted or falling into Daud’s hands. Not that he can make head nor tail of it, but it’s plain that there’s far too much of interest here to leave it unread. 

Well. He had nothing else planned, and anyway he has no wish to travel in the bitter cold until he can safely remove the stitches holding his skin together from jaw to temple. He retrieves his pack from the doorstep. The itch to speak to the black-eyed boy that’s been niggling in the back of his mind since he set foot on Tyvian ground grows, sharp and unwelcome.

There’s a back door and a fenced yard beyond it chest-high with packed snow, a shovel just outside. Daud brings a lamp to the threshold, clears a path to the back of the space and dumps Mikhaev’s body there, filling it in behind him. No point burying the man in rock-solid earth when winter’s coming in to do the job with snow.

It’s as he turns to head back inside that he sees the gate. It leads through to the yard behind the abandoned building, although both are buried in a good six feet of snow. A moment with the Void in his eyes, and Daud can see the buzzing shapes lying beyond them.

He glares at the shovel, back aching, head throbbing from the twin torments of injury and jagged Void song, and gets to work.

After some time the moon finally rises, a thin crescent of sheer white, and the buzzing-hissing-singing in his ears becomes louder and louder until it and the slide of snow onto the shovel is all there is. By the time he reaches the door it’s unbearable. He drops the shovel, and to his surprise the latch lifts easily, not stuck or even locked. Beyond it is a cold and rotting room, and a shrine.

Daud has long accepted that he will never go home, but the wash of violet-blue light (because there is always light, although somehow it never seems to be visible beyond the threshold), and the scent of waves and tidelines and of things long dead and half-devoured and unmourned — that is how he imagines _home_ might feel. He steps inside the building, closing the door and leaning the shovel against it, and approaches the shrine. The violet-shaded lanterns flicker, shifting the shadows of great spars of bone-white wood and making colours dance in the silk that billows between them.

In the centre of it all, holding pride of place on the small altar, is a shattered jumble of bone and iron. Twisted iron and jagged bone: not a single charm or rune remains whole. The reason for the discordant humming is clear enough now.

At his touch, the whole pile falls silent. The sudden stillness is deafening, the lack of pressure in his head a desperate relief. He waits for the shadows to envelop him in the Void, for the black-eyed boy to demand an explanation or perhaps even to exact retribution – but there’s nothing.

Perhaps that’s the Outsider’s own form of retribution.

Daud lets his fingers trace the edges of a rune split in two, the curls and barbs of the Mark, the jagged edges of the bone. In the light of the shrine he feels hazy, dreamlike, as if he’s standing apart and watching himself make decisions, as if he might dissolve into the violet shadows if he moves too abruptly.

He remembers, distantly, sitting in his mother’s lap as she carved, watching her blow the white dust away and drop ink into the grooves. There are metalworking tools at Mikhaev’s desk, chisels, files, saws. They’ll do for bone, and the iron is beyond his skill anyway. Hardtack and jerky in his pack, more than enough snow for water. An iron stove in the corner, Mikhaev’s winter woodpile in the yard. Perhaps someone might come to find Mikhaev, but he suspects not.

This is the first shrine he’s seen since he left Morley, the easiest place for the Outsider to speak with him; perhaps he won’t talk now, but Daud can wait as long as it takes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’d say we’re fairly near the end here but idek; so far this fic has progressed basically as planned and I’m still reeling from the shock of it. There may be an extension, as I’m rather enjoying freezing up in Tyvia with Daud, but I’m still deciding.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild chapter appeared!

The first week settles the chill into his skin, tucks it beneath his layers of fur and paints it on his lips so that they crack and bleed. The stove extends its warmth to a small area, but the cold creeps in through the ceiling and the walls, leaves tendrils of ice on the wood. On the third day it begins to snow and the world outside presses on the boarded windows, blacks and whites alike transmuted to violet in the shrinelight.

Daud spends most of his time cross-legged in front of the shrine, a pile of furs and blankets between him and the floorboards, and carves until his hands ache and his fingertips are nerveless from the cold. The bone dust floats down slow as the snow, forms drifts of ivory over the research papers spread out in front of him, distorting the letters until stray drafts blow it out over the furs. There are marks on the broken charms that he’s never seen before, their curves and dashes familiar but unreadable, as if the charms he wears in his inner pockets to augment his skills contain only a fragment of a vast language. Those, he can hold in his hand and understand instantly, even if their script is incomprehensible, but no matter how hard he listens, Mikhaev’s shattered remnants are silent and still as the corpses of the leviathans they were carved from.

On the fifth day he’s careless, and the tool slips over the bone to jam into the meat of his palm. He watches the blood well up, a mesmerising deep red in this world of glacial colours and a welcome distraction from the constant pain of the injury Mikhaev inflicted. No point rushing to bandage this; no one ever died from a stab wound to the hand. Crimson oozes down the slope of his skin and onto the whalebone, gives it a stain that dries to rust as he gazes at it, unmoving. For a moment he hears a buzzing on the edge of hearing, but the next moment it’s gone and he dismisses it as a noise of the wind against the shutters. He wraps a scrap of cloth around the skin anyway, not wanting to bleed all over his tools. That night when he sleeps, he dreams of blackened bone and a crumbling copy of a Void bloodied with roses, and wakes with frost on his lashes.

No one comes for Mikhaev. A week passes, maybe two, and although Daud hears the crunch of footsteps on snow as people pass, no one calls for the clockmaker, no one tries the unlocked door, no one even stops. His face begins to heal, he starts to run low on food, and still the Outsider is silent.

Every pen stroke on every page of the scattered papers is familiar now, and slowly they’re beginning to make sense – or maybe Daud is simply beginning to lose his. Mikhaev talks of weaknesses in the walls of reality, of a weight on the world that draws the Void, of the remnants of gods long forgotten and a place where those who cannot pass over linger in the black. The deconstructions of the Mark, which before Daud passed over in discomfort, draw him back again and again the same way they seem to have drawn Mikhaev. He turns over a bone shard to discover that he’s carved them into the obverse, and inks the sharp hooks and curves with a crawling discomfort.

By the time he runs out of food, Samara lies dark in the grip of winter, and with no daylight he loses track of time entirely. The lamps still burn violet, as if they take their fuel from the Void itself, and when he finishes the last carving on the last charm, the only noise is the soft roar of the stove.

He picks up the odd device he found in Mikhaev’s desk, turns it over in his hands, holds it out to peer through the smoked glass. Turns the single dial experimentally, to no effect. There are a couple of sketches of the thing in the notes, copiously labelled in handwriting even more unintelligible than the rest of it, but they’re untitled and unreferenced in the actual text.

If he chooses, he might die here. Gristol is a world away, back in the light and relative warmth of the southern sea, and no one will ever come to look for him. There is a kind of peace in that, he thinks, watching the firelight shimmer on the draped silk of the shrine. To choose the way in which he falls, silent and anonymous, instead of the sudden, violent and no doubt personal death that will inevitably catch up with him if he returns to his usual employment, perhaps even at the hand of another Marked one. The world doesn’t punish the wicked, he knows that, but his odds were never that good to start with, and the path he’s chosen has only reduced them. No one guards a heretic’s back, no matter how good his bladework.

His head feels light, and he has no idea when he last stood to get water or food, to stretch his aching legs and fingers.

The lamplight swims in his vision, darkens and flares to a deeper blue, bursts into fragments that fill the room. He might die here, if he chooses.

‘Of all the choices I saw you make when I Marked you, that wasn’t one I ever thought you’d consider, Daud. Has one more death out of so many really shaken you this much?’

Finally.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always welcome encouragement. If you want to give me a prompt or ramble about meta, poke me on [tumblr](http://intentandinvention.tumblr.com)!


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